This blog has been a way to interact with some of you around "subjects" that Aristotle has taught too many of us in the West, even today, to disparage: females, rhetoric, and translation. Much recovery yet to do.

It can be all Greek to me, and yet, and still, we all can see the play.

I've bolded and italicized and formatted the bits of text above to show some of the repetition, the variation on a theme, the parallelism even across parables.

Aristotle despised such play in language. Here's why: it didn't seem true to reality.

Reality has males above messy females, logic above messy dialectic and its counterpart rhetoric, and educated natural-born Greek men above all messy bar-bar-ians or slaves. End of story.

There is no need for fables, for parables, for others' stories. There is no need to change. No need to mess up reality.

When Aristotle at age thirty seven married Pythias his first wife, he that year declared that age thirty seven is the optimum age to marry for a man. He'd gotten his "virgin," as Hesiod said to:

Take to your dwelling a woman when you are ready to marry,Not long after your thirtieth birthday is something behind you,Nor when you're very much older, for that is the age to get married.See that she's four years older than puberty; wed in her fifth year.Marry a virgin to teach her all her respectable duties.Most of all marry a woman who lives in your neighbourhood, nearby.Looking about you, be sure no neighbour makes fun of your marriage.Surely a man can obtain nothing better at last than a womanWhen she is good; if she's bad, there is nothing more thoroughly tiresome;Keeping her eye on her dinner she kippers her husband howeverStrong without smoke. She'll bring him unwilling to early old age.--Work and Days (697-705, trans by Daryl Hine)

So just guess how young Aristotle's virgin was when he got her so naturally?

When Aristotle went bald early, he observed the reality that "The front part of the head goes bald because the brain is there and man is the only animal to go bald, because his brain is much the largest and moistest. Women do not go bald." And he went on to observe "Again, one quality or action is nobler than another if it is that of a naturally finer being: thus a man's will be nobler than a woman's," something the men of Sparta with their hair - their long hair - and with their ignobly free women failed to grasp.

If life changes sometimes, that's only natural. And nature from time to time will need a helping hand. Why? Well, logically because females sometimes fail in the procreative act. And their failing nature leads to female babies (which are penis-less and otherwise botched males); sometimes a defective mother having sex defectively can even lead to male offspring that's defective, to dwarfs and to other mutations. Fortunately, logic allows female infertility and animal mothers producing defective offspring to be overcome. Why, even good horsemen know this nature:

Krista Ratcliffe, in all her wonderful work on rhetorical listening, has correctly observed that Aristotle rejected "listening" in his canons of rhetoric.

Ratcliffe's is no small insight. Which may explain why Aristotle didn't hear Gorgias (whom his teacher Plato in the dialogue "Gorgias" has his teacher Socrates disparaging as mere Gorgias the "rhetorician"). Gorgias, in real reality, rather playfully was listening to Helen, giving her lots of wiggle room as to why she'd run off with a barbarian instead of staying home with an educated Greek man. Gorgias was listening to a woman. A vulnerable mess. This is listening rhetorically. Listening with intent for very personal, very subjective implications that are prone to make you soften your heart and change. You don't necessarily need to know educated Greek to hear.

If Mark had written and translated so that Aristotle could have read, then Aristotle wouldn't have listened to this nonsense either. Aristotle didn't listen to barbarians. Aristotle didn't change nature or his own nature.

3 comments:

Thanks for this JK I didn't know about Krista Ratcliffe's work and it looks as if I should try and move on to reading that after working my way through Grace Jantzen's books which have arrived this week chez moi.I love the idea of rhetorical listening. Oh dear - so many ideas out there and so little time!

Jane, I so appreciate your blogging. I'm going to make it soon I hope to Grace Jantzen's books. W/respect to Ratcliffe: my friend, Jason, who's finishing his dissertation on autism and rhetorical listening has a good blogpost on some of the things from "rhetorical listening." I miss being a student (as if we ever stop learning) so that one can have an excuse for reading more of the time!

Thanks JK, I'm enjoying blogging but need to control it a bit - I think I'm trying to partially run 5 blogs at the moment! and thanks for the link to rhetorical listening. My friend Janet who is really into her Remembered Bible methodology and links speech therapy and theology in her work is also excited about it. (should have put some commas into that but that is too much like the day job!)